Communication Researchers in Prague

It was an extremely intensive period of five days in Prague. So intensive and crowded that I have suffered from some kind of introvert hangover since then!

Pre-conference on PR theories was held
at the beautiful premises of the Charles University,
founded in 1348.

I first attended a pre-conference on PR theories on May 24th, followed by four full days of the annual conference of the International Communication Association (ICA). The theme of the conference was Voices.

This is not any in-depth analysis of the current stage of communication research but rather some very personal reflections after homecoming.

Participants of the PR theories pre-conference.

About ICA

ICA is a community of 4300 members from 80 countries. The Prague conference attracted 3500 participants so it was extremely popular. (ICA President Paula Gardner tells more about ICA here.)

ICA has 32 different Divisions and Interest Groups for different sub-fields of communications – from Mass Communication to Health Communication, from Public Diplomacy to Sports Communication. I am a member of the Organizational Communication and Public Relations Divisions and recently joined also the Instructional and Developmental Communication Division. Moreover, I am interested in what happens in the Communication and Technology Division which calls itself CAT and uses eagerly different cat figures in its messaging.

My ICA Conferences

I have attended ICA only once, in London in 2013. The annual conference is usually so far away from Finland that it would require a lot of time, money and effort to get there. Next year it will be in Washington, DC, in 2020 in Gold Coast, Australia and in 2021 in Denver, US – Europe again with Paris in 2022.

Some regular ICA goers gave good advice for newcomers in Twitter. They suggested them to stay within one division to learn to know people, to have enough time for coffee and chat, and to concentrate on themes that inspire and bring joy (the Marie Kondo approach to ICA!).

I could have chosen the strategy of digging deeper within the panels provided by my "own" divisions. However, I think I followed rather the idea of concentrating on the issues that I find inspiring. These themes included, for example, social media use and mental health, alternative organizing, and Great Ideas for Teaching. Moreover, because I teach at Business School, I had a need to update my knowledge of what is going on within a wide range of communication topics. The problem with this division hopping is that you do not really learn to know people and experience very little sense of belonging. I am going to dig deeper in the near future and have already uploaded tens of exciting papers.

Scholarly Role Models

One of the highlights of the conference was the Plenary by Professor Emeritus Elihu Katz – one of the founding scholars of communication research who turned 92 on May 31st! – in which he discussed the legacy of Paul Lazarsfeld in such a humorous and warm way. Lazarsfeld proposed that voting decisions are often made by consulting other individuals who often are exposed to the media (so called two-step flow of communication). This model preceded empirical studies of network, and the role of networks in the diffusion of innovations. Professor Katz was awarded the Steven H. Chaffee Career Achievement Award by ICA. He was given standing ovation for his talk – well, we first sat and applauded vigorously until Professor Katz gently reminded: "You should be standing!" :)

I think I learned a lot of other such sessions, too, where the most established scholars were on stage. Early on Saturday morning, for example, there was a State-of-the-Art-Session of the Public Relations Division which I truly enjoyed. Such a joy to see the opponent of my doctoral defence of 2007, Professor Emerita Betteke van Ruler from the University of Amsterdam, still sharing her bright ideas and wonderful research experience with us. In this panel she maintained that the field of public relations is currently flourishing but emphasized the importance of communication theory for the field. Professor van Ruler was appointed ICA Fellow at this conference as a recognition of her distinguished scholarly contributions within the field of communication. I am so proud! The press release on Professor van Ruler's appointment is available here.

Juan-Carlos Molleda from Oregon, Betteke van Ruler from Amsterdam,
Maureen Taylor from Tennessee and Chiara Valentini from Aarhus
outlining the state-of-the-art of PR research.

I think it was also a central notion by Denise Bortree, Pennsylvania State University, that we may be re-inventing theories that already exist but we do not know about them – while we should be developing something new. Moreover, I think communication researchers should appreciate and acknowledge the work done in the fields related to ours. (For example, in the PR theories preconference I heard researchers say that "marketing is short-term campaigning" and "marketing is one-way messaging". Both these claims reflect misunderstanding of what marketing is – or the concept of marketing was mixed with the one of advertising as often happens.)

The Editor-in-Chief of Public Relations Review Maureen Taylor mentioned that she is mainly reading manuscripts dealing with social media and crisis communication while she would like to see risk-taking theory-based pieces that would take the field forward. For me Kent and Taylor's article of 1998, Building Dialogic Relationships Through the World Wide Web, was one of the key papers of my doctoral thesis – that perspective was new 20 years ago.

Exciting Papers

The number of papers presented at ICA is truly overwhelming and the ten minutes' glimpse you get into someone's work is too short a time for understanding. After a conference like this you would need another five days just for checking your notes, reading and reflecting. I am still within this process (and in the middle of essay grading) but wish to mention a couple of themes and papers here.

The President of the United States has obviously offered communication reachers a lot of research material because there were many papers related to the presidential campaign and Trump. This was interesting because I used the communication of POTUS as an example case throughout my communication class last autumn. Conference papers offered a plethora of perspectives to presidential communication, like fake news as reputation management device; tweets, journalistic coverage and the rise of Trumpism; and Trump's portrait in the Russian media.


Another topic that I was interested in from the point of view of my teaching was instructor clarity, humor, immediacy and student learning. I am currently complementing my pedagogical knowledge on a course offered by our home university and we have discussed these issues a lot. A paper by Michelle T. Violanti et al from Tennessee dealt with this theme and replicated three previous seminal studies of instructional communication.

Moreover, it was interesting to read a paper by Stephen Michael Croucher et al (a team from New Zealand and Finland) on teacher confirmation, student motivation, and emotional interest in Finnish and United States university classrooms. Teacher confirmation means the process through which teachers communicate to students and make them realize that they are valuable individuals. This process involves responding to questions and comments, demonstrating interest in students' learning, and employing an interactive teaching style. The researchers found that American students perceived a higher amount of teacher confirmation and student motivation than the Finnish students. I think we should really ponder how to improve student-teacher relationships to enhance student satisfaction and motivation. However, I cannot help mentioning that the study referred to many sources that are more than ten years old and since then pedagogical thinking has advanced remarkably within the Finnish academia.

My colleague Jonna Koponen and I talked about students' learning experiences and outcomes on a flipped communication course. The paper was written together with Education researchers and it is related to the major pedagogical development project going on at the University of Eastern Finland. More than 100 teachers and 8000 students are involved. Photo by Rob van Roy.

A paper presented in my "home" Public Relations Division by Christopher Hendrik Ruehl and Diana Ingenhoff from Fribourg Using Brand Pages: Why and How Multinational Stakeholders Engage with Corporations on Facebook was very interesting and this was not just my opinion but the paper received the best paper award. I presume the paper will soon be published in some journal because it was not available at the conference website for download. I look forward to reading it. 

"Research Escalator" :) See below.

Another winner of the Best Paper Award  (Organizational Communication Division) was a paper by Ward van Zoonen et al from The Netherlands, entitled Explaining Online Ambassador Behaviors on Facebook and LinkedIn. It examined to what extent employees use their social media accounts to share updates about their organization. The authors found that this kind of ambassadorship is related to social (organizational identification) and individual (self-enhancement motives and segmentation preferences) drivers. When organizational life is an essential part of an employee's identity, s/he is more likely to share organizational information on Facebook. They showed also that employees who have a stronger desire to promote their competence engage in sharing workplace-related information on their social media channels.

Because I work at Business School, it was very interesting to see how the papers presented at the divisions of Organizational Communication and Public Relations overlapped with the research of Management and Marketing. For example, all papers presented at the Alternative Organizing session of the Org Comm Division would fit in the EGOS conference program as well (European Group for Organizational Studies): Buddhism (or mindfulness) and organizing, organizing successful shelters for the homeless, liquidity as an organizational framework, and alternative universities.

Inclusiveness vs. Exclusiveness

I wonder how much thought native English speakers give to the fact that many ICA participants are not native speakers. Many cheered to the idea of presenting without Powerpoints but did they think how exclusive that practice is? I myself, for example, teach and write in English all the time but if the speaker is very fast, if the research context in unfamiliar, if there are too many witty jokes involved and if the microphone is not used, I am completely lost. Add to this a very hot room with too few seats and not even seeing the discussants from the back row... So please, do not condemn slides! For example Aubrie Adams (California Polytechic State University) and Rob van Roy (KU Leuven) showed how to prepare excellent visuals that support your talk.

I happened to talk briefly with Betty Enypiu from Uganda and Hellen Nambiro Masiga Meleche from Kenya during a coffee break and then decided to attend a panel of the Feminist Scholarship  Division to take a look at their research. The session was entitled Independent Woman vs. Maternal Woman: Gender Roles in African Contemporary Settings.

ICA President Paula Gardner with Dorothy Njoroge and Hellen Nambiro Masiga Meleche from Kenya and Sylvia Nabasumba and Betty Enypiu from Uganda.

If I, coming from a privileged Northern welfare society, was totally lost every now and then at ICA both linguistically and culturally – how much harder this inclusiveness vs. exclusiveness question must be for our colleagues from totally different contexts.

I think ICA President Paula Gardner showed exemplary leadership in how she chaired this panel and encouraged its presenters. The previous ICA President Amy Jordan also attended. President Gardner talked about inequities and disparities in Communication and about the need to diversify the field in her powerful presidential address, too.

Moreover, ICA Executive Director Laura Sawyer showed leadership when two conference delegates "experienced racially-based harassment and a repeated ethnic slur from an adult male who bore a swastika tattoo" in the Old Town. A very unpleasant incidence, indeed, and, unfortunately, a reflection of a wider extremist right wing movement we have seen all around Europe.

Meeting with Russian Scholars

Enjoying the meeting with Russian and Eurasian scholars.
Photo by Olga Leontovich.

For some time already I have tried to find ways to establish contacts with Russian communication scholars. Russia is "the love of my youth" because I used to work as a nanny in an American diplomat family in Moscow right after high school, and spent a summer in St. Petersburg during my undergraduate studies. Therefore, I decided to attend the meeting of the Russian Communication Association (RCA) and the Communication Association of Eurasian Researchers (CAER). I have been negotiating about a teaching visit to the LCC International University in Klaipeda for some time and – how exciting! – their new professor, Dr. Mike Finch was at that meeting! What a pleasure to meet Mike! We'll see if my dream of working and living abroad will finally come true. Btw, in those parts of the world they are extremely generous with gifts and even I received a beautiful white stone necklace just because I attended the meeting...Thank you, Maureen Minielli!

Some Practicalities Like Panel Chairs

What a variety there was in conference panel chairs! Basically their task is always the same (introducing, time management) but they did their job SO differently! Some were extremely welcoming and supportive and assisted with technical problems. They were able to create a true sense of community within that short time slot. Some chairs came in at the same time as those presenting with the contribution of uttering: "The next is..."

Moreover, I hate the idea of having questions at the end of the panel. Each presentation has been prepared with sweat and pain and deserves to be acknowledged! Leave the questions to the end and the audience will remember only the last presentation. If there are no questions, the chair should ask some. It is the task of the chair to ensure that each presentation gets the time promised. Should not be too difficult!

Great Ways of Working

In addition to the traditional conference presentations – five 12-minute presentations plus discussion in a session of 75 minutes, and off to the next session – there were some very nice ways of working at ICA. There were, for example, so called Blue Sky Workshops which were meant to offer small group discussions and hands-on experiences on different topics. I attended one of these, entitled Teaching Skills and Social Justice: Learning Communication, Writing, and Journalism Skills and Diversity. Adina Schneeweis and Chiaoning Su from Oakland University led a great workshop and we had a chance to share our experiences and learn from each other.

Blue Sky Workshop on teaching and diversity.

Another great way of working was so called Research Escalator, organized by the Organizational Communication Division. It was a paper development workshop where young scholars were divided into groups of five or six according to their topics and each group had senior respondents to comment on their work. I attended the group themed Organizational Change & Continuity but did not understand that the Escalator was divided into two parts and, therefore, missed the papers that would have been the most interesting for me from the point of view of my Change Management course. I must contact the writers later.

Professor Marya Doerfel from Rutgers gives feedback to Melvin Gupton.

Beautiful Prague

It is nonsense to claim that the conference city would not matter – it does. Prague is a gorgeous city. Just so many others think so, too, and there are thousands of tourists in the Old Town – throughout the year, we were told. This was an interesting time to be in Prague – I think we all remember the Prague Spring of 1968. My husband was in Prague as a tourist and did a great job planning our evenings and post-conference sightseeing. He had studied his guidebooks and entertained me with amazing stories of the history of Prague. ICA tweets provided also nice tips for tourists, like the Church Night on Friday May 25th with more than 300 open churches to visit. Some of them offered also great music, for free.

St Martin Rotunda in Vysehrad.

After the conference we escaped the crowds to the hill of Vysehrad, the oldest part of the city with a Rotunda of the 11th century, beautiful cathedral, cemetery with the graves of Dvorak and Smetana, and, again, exciting legends of, for example, Queen Libuse who entertained his lovers in her bath and then had them pushed down the cliff to the Vltava river. Finally she married an ordinary peasant called Premysl and this was the beginning of the Premyslid dynasty which reigned from the 9th century to 1306.

The End

The following was very popular among the tweets under #ica18 so it may serve as a conclusion here, too. That's what intensive conferencing is like! Thank you, Gina Neff!